Mempowered Newsletter for April 2011

Editorial: 

I do apologize for my tardiness in getting this out -- I meant to get the newsletter out well before Easter. However, I do hope, if Easter isn't your chance of catching up with these sort of things!, that you file this away for later reading. My post on how working memory works is much lengthier than usual, but working memory is such a core concept, so vital for memory and comprehension and reason, and our idea of it has matured quite a bit in recent times, that I felt it warranted a 'proper going-over'.

As always, I hope you find my information useful.

Dr Fiona McPherson

Contents: 

Effective Notetaking now available in print
How working memory works: What you need to know
Memory is complicated
Resources

Effective Notetaking now available in print

Very excited to be able to tell you that Effective notetaking is now available in hardcopy. It's distinctly larger than Mnemonics for Study, but not large for a workbook. I'm very pleased to have both of these available now as paperbacks as well as digital formats.
How working memory works: What you need to know

Working memory is at the core of how we reason, understand, and remember.

Working memory capacity is now thought to be limited to four items, of which only one can be attended to at any one time.

Differences in working memory capacity probably have a lot to do with our well we form our memory codes — our skill in leaving out irrelevant material, and our skill at binding together the important stuff into a tightly-bound cluster.

Our ability to do this may decline as we age.

Factors that make some tasks more difficult than others include:

  • how often we have to shift our focus,
  • whether information already in focus has to be altered and how much time and effort is needed to change it, and
  • how complex the information is (how difficult it is to craft it into a tightly-bound cluster).

A New Yorker cartoon has a man telling his glum wife, “Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived I wanted you to feel.” There are a number of reasons you might find that funny, but the point here is that it is very difficult to follow all the layers. This is a sentence in which mental attributions are made to the 6th level, and this is just about impossible for us to follow without writing it down and/or breaking it down into chunks.

According to one study, while we can comfortably follow a long sequence of events (A causes B, which leads to C, thus producing D, and so on), we can only comfortably follow four levels of intentionality (A believes that B thinks C wants D). At the 5th level (A wants B to believe that C thinks that D wants E), error rates rose sharply to nearly 60% (compared to 5-10% for all levels below that).

Why do we have so much trouble following these nested events, as opposed to a causal chain?

Let’s talk about working memory.

Working memory (WM) has evolved over the years from a straightforward “short-term memory store” to the core of human thought. It’s become the answer to almost everything, invoked for everything related to reasoning, decision-making, and planning. And of course, it’s the first and last port of call for all things memory — to get stored in long-term memory an item first has to pass through WM,...
Memory is complicated

Recently a “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” came out in the U.S. This framework talked about the importance of inculcating certain “habits of mind” in students. One of these eight habits was metacognition, which they defined as the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge.

The importance of metamemory was emphasized in two recent news items I posted, both dealing with encoding fluency, and the way in which many of us use it to judge how well we’ve learned something, or how likely we are to remember something. The basic point is that we commonly use a fluency heuristic (“it was easy to read/process, therefore it will be easily remembered”) to guide our learning, and yet that is often completely irrelevant.

BUT, not always irrelevant.

In the study discussed in Fluency heuristic is not everyone’s rule, people who believed intelligence is malleable did not use the fluency heuristic. And in one situation this was absolutely the right thing to do, and in the other situation, not so much. Because in that situation, what made the information easy to process did in fact also make it easier to remember.

The point is not that the fluency heuristic is wrong. Nor that it...
 
Resources: 

The Alzheimer's Association recently released a report on the scale of the problem facing the baby boomer generation. Generation Alzheimer's: The Defining Disease of the Baby Boomers can be downloaded at http://www.alz.org/boomers/ (you do have to enter your email address for it to be sent to you)

Educational resources:

Annenberg Media have put up a nice resource on "Physics for the 21st century", produced by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Science Media group and the Harvard University Department of Physics. Well worth a look. http://www.learner.org/courses/physics/

The Khan Academy is chock full of instructional videos, mainly on math and science topics. http://www.khanacademy.org/

Teachers and students might find inspiration in this concept map of ecology, produced by students in an experimental two year Masters in Coastal and Marine Biology & Ecology http://www.mapecology.altervista.org/ (This map was briefly discussed at http://blog.the-scientist.com/2011/04/07/mapping-ecology/ )

A new website put up by the American Association for the Advancement of Science might be of interest to teachers and parents (even ones outside the U.S.). The site presents 600 items that teachers can use to test middle and early high school students' understanding in the earth, life, physical sciences, and the nature of science. Importantly, it also tests for common misconceptions. The site also has detailed information on on how well U.S. students are doing in science and where they are having difficulties, broken out by gender, English language learner status, and whether the students are in middle school or high school. http://assessment.aaas.org/

Oxford University has some free literacy and numeracy teaching resources at http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/research/child-learning/resources/ . They also have a number of special literacy and numeracy resources designed for deaf children.

You are receiving this email update either because our records show you asked to be placed on our mailing list, or a colleague forwarded a copy to you. The Mempowered Newsletter gathers new articles and resources from the Mempowered website. The Mempowered News Digest is a regular digest of the memory research reported on the website. You can also follow both the Mempowered blog and the news via RSS feeds.

If you wish to subscribe to either newsletter, please enter your details at www.mempowered.com/newsletters. A link to unsubscribe is at the foot of every newsletter. If you encounter any problems subscribing or unsubscribing, or if you have any questions, contact me at admin@mempowered.com (or use the contact link at the bottom of every webpage).